Introduction-

 

America's distinction is in being liberal, practical and having shallow historical vision and technocratic confidence.  But, especially unique is its being  modelled on natural not historical sciences and involving liberal individualism.  Looking beyond history to see a natural plan below.  So tinkiering technocratically with individuals responding to stimuli in the natural process of capitalism.  Evolving between 1870 and 1920, it has its root in the German historicism and has its rock in American Exceptionalism (AE), the belief that America has an exceptional place in history based on her republican government and economic opportunity.  The civil war and rapid industrialism caused us to understand history in the modern sense: a process of continuous , qualitative change moved and ordered by processes within itself.  We decided that AE doesn't block the forces of modernity from us, but rather supports it.  The liberal harmony was shifted into the future.  As it seemed the flux of history would engulf us we turned to a technical quantification of these natural processes to control them.  AE evolves from liberal values and a distrust of capitalism and history.

 

EUROPEAN SOCIAL SCIENCE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

 

CHAPTER 1: THE DISCOVERY OF MODERNITY

 

Social sciences emerged from historians recognition of history being of human creations.  Not until the early 19th century did the quantitatively, cause and effect , view of history changing take hold.  All reality was then put into historical context and this is call historicism or a historicist view.

The rational view taken to nature and the particularistic view of history emerged in Mostesquieu, adam Smith and Condorcet.  They noted differences in national arts in time.  Civic humanism in the renaisance gave such things meaning and led to 18th century understanding of historical causation.  Agriculture was stable and modern civilization, commerce and refinement caused decay.  Adam Smith said rejuvination was in freeing uniform behavior of all men in all nations and time.  Smith found virtue etc. rooted in economic stages of diversity called for representative govt.  Condorcet saw human reason pushing history forward.  Adam Smith accidents.  French revolution made kant and hegel say we must work out our destinies in the arena of history.  Romanticism created an appreciation of historical and other differences and contingency. 


The term "livweral" was first used by early 19th century radicals trying to end mercantilist and fuedal systems.  It took the love of diversity and enlightenment rights rap, but always has a conflict between the individuals rights and public good.  English were for the individual and negative economimic tendency called "classical liberalism".  German liberalism of kant needed state action and harmony for the development of the state.  Conservatives said the classical liberalism created disharmony and exploitation of workers.  Comte (in France) accepted much of this organicist criticism and Smiths' diversity and Condorcet's progress of reason and vied for an authoritarian technocratic hierarchal state.  Germany's recent unification made it think all rights are from the state. Economy had to be studied as a part of a nation ( England had lost its grasp of reality).  Marx came out of this German mileau.  In England, Malthus and Ricardo had dire predictions (if marginal land was brought into production less productiveness would cause rent to rise).  JS Mills saw improvement if moral behavior (abstinence) was practiced.  Spencer put the last piece of social sciences in place by advocating volunteer associations (embodying heterogenuity by being cooperative in competition).  Another problem conquered was how to make solid values in a changing world:  reason, progress and law (used in an escape from history) and science.  Laws of nature through which divine governence flowed melded science and eternal natural law views positivism (drawing on the enlightenments idea that only phenomenon could be known) said scientific knowledge was the only certain form an dtherefore preferred.  Newtons synthetic deductive form was for Mill the decisive mark of science, but that many factors in Social sciences other than political economy required "art' and human nature to be accounted for.  Comte said sociology didn't need the synthetic deductive form of Newton and MIll.  Via historical study laws like his animistic to metaphysic to reason could find laws of social progress.  Natural laws found could be applied.  Mill disagreed: Politics world was moral philosophy and would be unlikely to yield to science.  Hegel's history put all in teleological categories and froze history studies.  The exceptions were historians that used science to detect facts of history without vision.. Ranke for one.  Positivists said the meat was below the chronicle of kings.  Germany goes into history, but England, with its continuity, goes more for political economy.

 

 

THE AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALIST VISION

We devoloped from a revoution in Christian and republican time.  Reformation prophecy would bring promised millenium and end history.  "court" folk believed in state and improvement, country folk believed in a turning back to first principles.  Court managed history, country sidestep it.  We landed between agricultural and early commerce in government.  republicanism + protest = "civil religion".  republican denouncing of corruption and sin dovetailed.  Before the revolution our destiny was likened to the tuetonic anglo saxson of rome and magna carta fame.  Both views flatten history and make it "the past" and go away and take us to a special future.


Political economy wise we feared the industrialism of England, but admired the labor as virtue and our fears were mitigated by the availability of land and republican lifestyle opportunity.  These political and economic views of history formed American Exceptionalism, though often the premises weren't challenged before celebration.  The parties formed around and split around AE.  A. Jackson democrats saw AE threatened by encroaching aristocracy. The whigs felt his efforts to represent the masses over men would lead to tyranny.  They, like JS Mill thought an understanding arisocracy to bolster against the masses' tyranny swing necessary.

There were cntrifugal tendencies at work those.  The Protestant , republican, and liberal ideals in AE made an unsteady alliance.  Running counter to all of this were organic thoughts of public good and commmunity (opposing republicanism and moral self responsibility) as well as doubts about our viability.

 

Antebellum contexts of social science--

  The major anti AE, in this fertile Social Science soil, came from the South and specifically John C. Calhoun and Dew.  They made slavery bulwak of republicanism against the corruption of northern industrialism.  Slavery was timeless and created freedom for the superior races and we need the organic public food social vision not the individualism of Adam Smith.  This vision died with the Confederacy.  This was based on Comte.  The other critics were radical working class types.  Skidmore was one.  Most accepted we could use our current intitutions.  Skidmore didn"t.

The mainstream were Whigs and Democrates.  The Whig conservative believed in education as the bulwark against the potentially radical natural rights.  The Demos were for diversity. This and elite religious college tendencies most affected social sciences.  As sufferage spread they felt their  import diminish and so turned to social institutions.  They pushed political economy, history and politics into the still largely classical college curriculum.  Social sciences were taught as moral philosophy betwen the theology and natural philosophy within the Scottish sciences ahd devoloped.  It was practical and had the religious morality.  Rational reflection upon truths that came were moral (and you oculd still accept Lockes empiricism, Berkely without idealism and Hume without skepticicm.

The debate over AE was big in the universities.  Political science was first studied and it concerned very diverse topics so it isn't suprising a German immigrant (with Whig sympathies was the most influential  person.  Francis Lieber, natural rights and law and state love and moral teachings took root well here.  Redeveloped Kantian "political ethics".  As social beings, the state was on highest expression (with a liberal economy).  But the government must be limited.  Man is individual and social so goernment must be and be limited.  He didn't like French majoritarian democracy.  Then he started to involve history via "social analysis" in which the essential was separated from the superficial.  He thus okayed history. Politics connection and study of detail and tied our country to Tuetonic "anglican" self government "articulated" (not abstract like Frances) could balance wealth and liberty in longevity.   His friend, Alex de Tocqueville, was less sanguine fearing the lack of hierarchy will kill differentiation and lead to a mass of self centered and unimaginative conformists.


Walker Say, Wayland did political economy and consciously used ideas to stem revolt and favor free enterprise.  He pushed "moral consumption"  Others went for protarrif "positive" action to keep America a strong leader.  List mixed this with Nationalism and returned to Germany and wrote a founding text of German Nationalistic economics.  Carey refuted Malthus because labor was getting more efficient and , therefore, worth more!He used history to show that all failings to achieve capital formation and stop poverty were moral (in wars and pilferring) but republican government would stop that.  Carey said tarrifs were good as they caused diversidy and association, not colonial specialization (like Englands mercantilism caused) He bolstered his laws of association with physics metaphors (heat and motion0 not historical analysis.  Correct political economy was as G-d would have it, as in the workings of physics.  Seeing labor and capital in harmony he fell into Whig disfavor when he noted that greenback currency 'would' increase wages, loosen credit and accelerate growth.  He was sure that all was well and that "G-d was not a blunderer."  After the civil war all was less well and his influence diminished.

Both protariff and free trade folk attributed progress to natural law, not history.  When history did appear it was to be as a realm of error, superstition and corruption.  The laws of nature were, of course, these through which G-d governed.  After, in the gilded age, secular nationalism and historicism begin to undermine the early conception of natural law and AE.

 

PART II - THE CRISIS OF AE, 1865 - 1896

CHAPTER 3 ESTABLISHMENT OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCE DISCIPLINES

 

Before the civil war the social sciences were undifferentiated.  After the war , wealth and specialization.  This trend was galvinized by crisis in AE.  Science challenged the idea of divine providence and challenges and challenges and change via industrialization and reconstruction challenged our place in the sun.  1860s and 1870s many went to German universities which had no religious test and had the discovery of natural knowledge in mind.  Protestants after the civil war attacked Catholics.  The NE gentry thought them both nuts.  Amasa Walker, Lester Ward and Carrol Wright led this.  This is before Darwins 1870 origins"  The positivism of liberal gentry and orthodoxy grew and as they bent orthodoxy to christianity and started fighting bias, cencorship and founding secular universities, they took a critical eye to AE.  Germans coming after the 1870commune of Paris brought communism, this and lack of upward mobility, shook faith in AE.  It gave us our first look at change.  Saloman said there is discontinuity with the past and so we can only deal with the existing.  Realism and study of fact was born.  Moasculine and hating the subjective, it went to war.  Statistics use rose.  American uniqueness was upheld in natural law but failure to accept the possibility of change led to many apocolyptic proclimations.   These all had class conflict behind it.  The NE intellectual gentry on the sidelines during the war took a seat and took over moral authority from the religious and with the rich.


HISTORICO-POLITICS AND rEPUBLICAN PRINCIPLE

 

Henry Adams made one more grand synthesis attempt before Lieber laid the main path to guilded age social sciences.  He used Sir Henry Maines' 1871 discovery of Aryan sanskrit tie to link us as Tuetonic coming from the cold mideival mountain to the still ocean of science.  Fiske did much the same while incorporating Spencers diversity.  But this wedding of aryan history to natural science hit religious stonewalling and stopped.

It was picked up and successfully driven home by Lieber who tied the Tuetonic chain to the methodological premises of histiography, not natural science.  Though dead in 1867, his disciples tied all to historic laws.  Historic-politics tried to maintain the Tuetonic principles of civil liberty, Fearing class conflict and that we'd become a republic in name only, they sought to crate an aristocracy of good men in public service.  Woodrow wilson came from this mileau.  These folk sought to strengthen their science by using the critical historical method of Ranke.  Feeling that from these facts would discern they they the underlying principles of progress without recourse to philosophy (realism or idealism).  Burgess, using this method, decided that the state was a product of the progressive revelation of human reason through history.  Facts beget political ideals not yet realized, these become ideals and then laws and institutions.  He organized study around political and economic theory, legal institutions historically and did research on the comparitive examination of modern political institutions.  His hegelian ways led him to republican virtues as the ultimate (Tuetonically).Tuetonways were fixed like laws of nature or the constitution, in the advancing spirit of each age.  tied to England by Adams we had history, not divine providence to guide us.  Burgess, Adams and Lieber used this to call for strengthening of republican established institutions and subordinating the individual to history and community!  In the New England fields Adams found the cooperative husbandry of the German folk villiage.  Plymouth wasn't founded by an everyman for himself squatter sovereignty, but community first.  Labor rebelliousness and selfish management principles come under attack.  He liked Drummonds "evolution is the struggle for others".  Burgess said "only the nations will could transform the ethical feeling of the individual into rights.  Until this happens the assertion of rights is as an ignorant boast or a disloyal threat.  This comes from a past civil war person.  Individual conscience was naught when against the national will.  The constitution came from revolutionary and historical expression of national will.  Not legal action.  He wanted amending the constitution to be easier, so he saw change and so was historical, but looked to an eternal unrealized dream.  So we see a blend of AE as historicism creeps in.


1870s-80s the rise of Dunbar and Francis walker marked the rise of economics (political economy) as a separate positivistic discipline.  Moving away from Carey's analysis which used science like saying things were like thermodynamics and all economic failure in history was a matter of moral failings.  They sought to extract morality.  Using positivist empirical facts they had to face that because of change we were not, by providence , immune from history.  Francis Walker saw this and that classical economic theory wasn't divine either. There is room for change and sympathy with workers. The empiricist strain said no a priori.  Hypothetical and not scientific law.  The deductive method of classicaleconomy simplified and distorted.  History showed different circumstances and national character should be accounted for.  We had to discover subordinate causes of difference.  The worker had to be seen in the present and see his hope in the present and future and classical was good but it needed competition, not monopoly to function well.

While Walker crated a tentative realistic basis, William Graham Sumner justified it on a more constricted rationalization for AE.  Sumner and Ward created the first compelling tradition of social sciences in America based on Comte and Spencer.  Sociology was to be a science of the laws of history.  They showed that property rights and limited government were fixed in the American republic.  We must use historical and statistical induction to get a t the laws of history.  He drifted until the Railroad strikes of 1877.  He said as crowding increases competition and inequality increase and those at the top deserve to be there and moral corruption may combat the equalizer of expansion to fresh lands.  we may become an old country yet and doubted progress.  Yet people here have opportunity because we are a people of contracts not status.


Ward made the other big sociology attempt of the 1880s.  he was a positivist ala comte and said the agent of progress in the world is advances in knowledge (scientific rationalism was the ultimate).  The scottish enlightenment saw progress caused by economics.  American protestentism and German idealism saw it in religious and moral forces.  Ward, White and Sumner saw it in natural knowlegde.  Ward especially attacked the churches.  He constructed his sociology on scientific rationalism and said folks should "get capital" and "get education".  He was born poor and educated himself (5 languages) He saw big differences between educated and uneducated folks.  "Happiness comes from progress, progress by knowledge and knowledge by education"  He was like a liberal comte.  Science could provide the direction and order a fragmentaing society needed.  "Sociocracy" would replace politics and government.  Whereas Sumner thought societies form came from natural organic growth and we could accept it or go backwars, Ward (following comte not Spencer) saw human purpose asoverriding blind native history.  society and culture came from laws.  Scientific laws showed cause and effect (despite what mill or comte said and he ushered in the new liberalism and social intervention.  This was of huge import.  He escaped positivists determinism, but kept the idea that society was like physical nature and open to mechanical intervention.  The concept of change led America to history and then controlling it. He called for social engineering.  He looked at society with a biological model.  Desire and appetites (preservative, reproductive, aesthetic, moral and intellectual are the primary motive forces.  History is a chronicle of errors.  All suffering comes from a violation of natural laws through error or ignorance of the laws.  JS Mill was the one that formulated (for the Anglo world) that human reason can direct human life. 

So in this chapter we went from divine guidance informing natural and historic order (eternal) into order and discernable in nature and history themselves to bolster our Liberal republican AE.  From the Tuetonic tradition we come to the gighest form of progress: us.  Ward and Walker allowed change and Ward showed history is not exactly subservient to natural law (biological) but history was still the cause in the past.  And it could be contained and manipulated by man.

 

THE THREAT OF SOCIALISM IN ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY

 

So sooner had the new basis of AE been formed than it was torn by the threat of socialism and open warfare between social scientists emerged.  Farmer protests were republican and egalitarian.  Populist and progressives and socialists could take over.  It was an open question in the 1880s.  The cooperatives had an equally vallid AE as capitalists.  republican self governence via cooperatives v. individualism.  Both tried to tie themselves to American tradition but only the radicals advocated change.  The word "un-American" came to be used.  The first peak of this battle was during the depression and strikes of 1873-7.  The second in the depression of 1885.  The growth of the Knights of Labor and the may 5 1886 Haymarket  riot, Pullman 1894, Coxey's army 1894 and 1896 election.

 The social scientists who led the drive for a new political economy were from the same evangelical children WASP New England cliche that ruled the century.  Jews and Catholics  were nearly as discriminated against as blacks.  The clique valued morals conscience in social, personal and political life, salvation of the whole community and milennial underpinnings of the American republic religion.  They were also influenced by German historical economics and the morality of Laissez Faire to some problems.  Econ was seen as an ethical as well as a historical science.  John Clark and Richard Ely were dedicated to the working class since the early 19th AE  consensus was based on American liberal republican institutions providing liberty, relative harmony and equality.  Socialist critique pitted liberty against equality, individual self interest against the common good.  When Spenser and Darwin said "nature red in tooth and claw.  It made people feel to be human was to rise above. They looked to native communal organicism and democratic collectivism and cooperative socialism for the original liberal - republican

hope.  And these men were hightly influenced by Darwin.

 

Clark, Adams and Ely had millenial socialist hopes for God and us.  Ely, as the others,a historical economist, said classical economic laissez faire was an 18th, early 19th century thing.  And he started a magazine and organization called The American Ecomonomics Association to combat Sumner and the conservative heavies (1885)


The questions were for the new historic school: Did historicism force a new look at AE?  Achange in methods from classical methods and substance?  What of ethics?  Putting classical in its historic place Ely wanted few inductions from more carefully scrutinized facts.  Within the historicist movement they had sharp disagreeements but decided airing them in public was bad for all concerned (the profession).  The type comps the historicists (deductive) v. the classical economists (inductive) decided not to fight so fiercly.  All had to disassociate from the word socialism.  Historicists vied for applying economics to specific problems.  Classicists said perhaps the economists could tell the politician what was impossible, but excluded positive action.  Mill said the art of economics was different from application.  Adams and historicists said the split between "art" and "practice" was artificial.  Ely said things had to be done and we must also, platonically, work to a perfect future.  This required values and (so classicists excluded) Christian idealism could assume this role.  Classicists thought their vision moral, but their professionalism rested on objectivity (in their minds).  The Haymarket riot of 1886 sent some running from implications of socialism.  Ely and Adams held out longest, but professional threats reigned them in.  The AEA had end its bar against classical economists and Ely was relieved of his leadership position. 

 

Clark was the most talented of the new historicist economists, but retreated.  In doing so he added to and created marginalist economic theory and he created the diminishing returns and vast buyers determine value as seen in price ideas.  He thought, as England had transitioned past acrimony America would get unions and all would stabilizeand the historicism view would atrophy.  He also developed the idea that all recieve due to the value they add and that competition will make profit shrink and that economics distributed social goods and is therefore good.  This gave a better moral backing for Laissez Faire than classical's self interest and competition are good the definition of value by labor or an economy driven by capital accumulation, Clark saw that the vast pool of skilled poor paying jobs created folk who wouldn't go up and bound the educated and the rich.  This for him was republican and would facilitate enough goods so that strife wouldn't result.  He put AE again on an eternaal changeless course as seen by James Harrington to be beyond history as he gave some moral legitimacy to it.  Society would change some but his basic economic laws wouldn't.  Again like the wave of an ocean.


The sociologists quarrel:Small v. Giddings.  Sociology was the last develope social science.  It got into universities in the 1880s.  Albion Small in 1892 got the first chair of sociology in the country.  Giddings helped Clark with his marginalist theories.  Small (a preacher) was not convinced by the solemn conclusions drawn from facts of AE.  He had millenial hopes and thought sociology the means to the goal of a Christian Kingdom.  He said sociology hat three parts 1) Descriptive sociology was used to  separate the permanent from the transient features of society 2) Then it must correlate all positive knowledge to deal with the social forces: health, wealth , sociablity, knowledge beauty and righteousness and the equilibrium of a perfet society (statical sociology).  Then 3) was to investigate how to turn the actual into the ideal (dynamic sociology).  So the study for the mutuality of society and personal realization of all of its members.  Hegelian "conventionality is the thesis, socialism is the antithesis and sociology is the synthesis.  Professionally he had to avoid any pro socialism statements.  But he was proud of his reform work (he helped negotiate the pullman strike.  He was in touch with business leaders and clerics and solicited charity)  But real change had to wait till the science of society produced more information.  The ethical sociologist was more prescriptive than descriptive.  But he had to be cautious and said "the zealot prophets of righteousness were doing more harm than good" and that "if institutions are defective they are the reflection of defective social knowledge.

Franklin Giddings produced a positivistic philosophy of history that identified the actual and the ideal.  He found tremendous sympathy with Spencer and classical economy.  So he believed in a slow evolution towards the better with capitalism.  He was friends with John Clark.  He thought there no special ethical function in science.  Economics for example could predict future trendds.  Whether this is ethical or not isn't important.  An evolutionary positivist, he wanted to find the natural , social and sexual types that survived.  Extremes in wealth were bad for survival.  We , fortunately, have  a dilligent ethic "from the simple democracies of rural America"And this left its mark on larger society and must be preserved.  The need for moral continuity led him to why folks are social.  he found the secret of society was association in which like was attracted to like.  Would association and  industrialism crash our our fiber?  Where Small thought sociology fundamental because comprehensive because it incorporated elementary psych principles and their social transformations. The psych to the real without history.  This "sociology" was a far from agreed upon thang.  So the battle was historic and inductive battled now and deductive.  Between describing ethically what was and what should vev. describing what is.  Small was trying to be couth and guard his job but after McCarthying Bemis because mor radical and attacked Giddings for his trying to stick with facts and avoid subjectivity as a worship of science.  "Scholars are shirkers unless they grapple with problems in society.  Thats what they support us for."  But after 1896s election he reversed himself again.  The producers democracies and cooperative commonwealth gave way to reaction.  Small changed from prescribing the ideal to what people actually want.  The description or discovery of solutions was for sociology.  But for a discovery to be real most men must agree to it.  If most don't want equal distribution it isn't "real" and its insane to agitate for it, Ely too saw the weight of history.

 

PART III

PROGRESSIVE SOCIAL SCIENCE 1896-1914

 


ch5 THE LIBERAL REVISION OF EXCEPTIONALISM

 

After the election of 1896 and depression of 1897 the economy picked up.  After the knights collapsed the AFL took over.  Yet in the worst of 1897 it only had 5% of the working class in its ranks.  They spoke for older Europeans as new immigrants flooded in.  But the IWW declared class warfare in the name of anarcho-syndicalism.  Eugene Debs got 1 milllion votes in 1912 and so the threat of socialism carried over into the new century.  The way of dealing with it changed though.  Political reform minded independents made changes that undermined political parties and political sufferage creating the progressive era and giving social scientists room to reform and run for office and advise government.  They  had the balancing act of being against the conservatives and the socialists.  Scientific racism grew and conservative reaction to radicalsim created division.  Walker, Francis documented the higher birthrate of recent immigrants and lower rate of natives meant the improving effect of higher wages would allow us to escape the Malthusian trap in 1884.  But in 1890they made him call for immigration reform.  In the progressive era the traditional American fear of decay focused on imigrants.  This cut across the division between positivists and historicists.  Social discord was also agravated by the breakdown of Victorian gender roles.  The poor worked and the rich wanted sufferage.  Divorce went up and sociologists were astute to the changes wrought by industrialism (value crisis) well described by Small (all seemed questionable).  And classes, regions and ethnic groups become aware of its values being opposed by others of lower development (the South has blacks, temperance drunks, organized labor scabs, the city slums).  The destructive side of American pluralism fueled the new liberal search for a social ethic.  Dewey "one can hardly believe there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete."  In reacftion the old AE's apocalyptic gilded age response gave into liberal historicism.  We looked to the future.  But though our future was no longer altogether exceptional, we we untied progress from natural law (which says that most nations fail to progress) and attached ourself to a utopian ideal with us at the forefront it also survived in the  need to deny class conflict and the flight from history to nature where science promised control.  Seligman, a jew, in 1905 "America is leading the world and showing other countries what stages they have still to traverse". And the grafting of the modern industrial society on "persistent primitive stock" made the present confusing.  Croly's 1909 The Promise of American Life is the representative text of the progressive movement.  It also changes AE.  The nationalist view of America continues but the liberal republic idea thins.  Individuals rationally involved voluntary association (not owning resources of production) made the US.  By the turn of the country Adam Smith's sympathy and Clark's "invisible hand" were supplementing this harmony.   The left and right mystified as they tried to reconcile social harmony and possesive individualism.


Psychology  played a central role in social sciences from their inception.  Hume had urged a search for universal consistences and variation in human nature and Mill reaffirmed the vasis for the moral sciences.  At a distance historic politics were said to rest on psychological principles classical economics was similar and marginalism claimed utilitarianism.    Critics used psychology assumptions too.  So in 1890 the emergence of functional psychology implications for social science were expored.  Functional psych was developed by Dewey and James and Baklwin and studies of perception and attention coming from labs.  But it owed its first inspiration to Darwin.  The mind was an organ of adaptation so 1) mind was active purpose agent in transactions with the environment and 2) it always sought to adjust to a changing social environment from 1) a will that could change the environment to rational specifications and from 2) a socialized individual down to the rational consensus adjustment enforced.  Smith and Spencer saw progress in economics.  The french model put reason behind social progress and JS Mill's 1859 "On Liberty" essay gave reason a social setting.  Progress comes from creative minds that challenged the norm.  After Darwin these classic models of liberal history were reshaped into evolution via adaptation and natural selection.  Dewey told his students biology has now transfered its ideas to economics.  Economic, social and scientific invention became rational responses to a changing environment or selection.  Karl Pearson's grammar of Science" promised objective things to agree upon amongst social fragmentation via objectivity and banishing metaphysics and bias.  But some, like Small, recognmized the need for ethics.  meanwhile, the profession still had to show its merit though imperialism provided a big boom in cultural experts.  But until the 20s the audience was respectable upper and middle class students and they remained ever concerned about seeming professional.  But in being so wider ranges of opinions would be tolerated.  Theprofessionalization can be seen as reflecting on decentralized capitalist and middle class supported university system and the English aristocrats resisted expansion and Germany and Franch universities were state controlled.  In Europe social sciences were kept under philosophy and history mostly (both were underdeveloped in the US) and the same powers that allowed these to emerge on their own allowed separation.  But professionalism kept some continuity.


Dewey represents the still porous nature of social sciences at this juncture (a philosopher with training in psychology wanting to be a social sciences).  His pragmatism emerged directly from the gilded age crisis of AE and revised the exceptionalist heritage to embody the new liberal and historicist awareness of change (yet this response was linked to the exceptionalist heritage.  He loved democracy as an organic whole destroying dualism (a pet peave) and uniting the individual and the social organization.  Not the loss but gain of selfhood.  The idea of destroying democracy ends the distinction between church and state.  While young at University of Michigan he said "ethics as political science and political science as ethics", there  he and the Ford brothers edited and wrote for "Thought News".  in it , according to N. Coughlan, Dewey had a breakthrough: Philosophy is like science, an inquiry into experience  and experience can be understood by an examination of action via the psycho-physical act of thinking and the socio-historical model of progress.  The balance of individual and history in 'type-action" is Hegel's phenomenology of the mind and spirit which (I think) knit together subjectivity, objectivity , individual-society, past-future.  He put this on Darwin he saw the mind  as an organism of adaptation.  Truth the solution that most fully resolved strain or friction.  No difference between truth and values (all relative to changing experience). Oughtness: the bad act partial and the good complete.  All the conditions and the whole self involved the individual growing, realized in a larger community.  We cannot extract fixed standards infact, only if freed from absolutes can we act responsibly in the uncertainty of history.  This discordant world of harmonization was coming out of conflict and (without civic humanism, christian or idealist language) Democracy remained the towards which history moved.  Relativity with teleology.  Reconstructing  his inherited ideals along naturalistic and historicist basises he had FAITH in the millennial vision.

 Deweys pragmatism  was a new liberal philosophy like moderate Christian gilded age socialists he saw society as a family community whose differences were harmonized by common interest.  But he didn't see it now.  " democracy is an ideal of the future, not a starting point.""in this respect society is still a sound aristocrat.  What is meant in detail by a democracy of wealth we shall not know until it is more a reality than now"  His fling with radicalism was brief knowing we must accept the "established facts of life"  mediating between laissez-faire and socialist radicalism science democracy and industrialism were his machined of progress.  The modern individual is and end in himself in democracy.  If dewey drew together indivudualists and organicist traditions in an effort to socialize liberalism.  He believed (like Spencer) that the struggle for existence, competition and division of labor were creating functional interdependence.  interdependence byond Spencer it showed him a social process of intelligence, education and government action that mediated and completed social action derived from the economic.  he specifically added the "social sensorium" a mediating realm of conscious interaction of individuals and by language.  Through it individual consciousness became social.  We define and accomodate our actions to others.  A harmonious society could not be achieved until individuals are fully socialized.  The falsity of Anarchy is in not seeing how hard it is to bring ones interest into harmony with the shole.  On one level he is redefining individualism, on another , he is a hegelian exceptionalist.  All opposition between the individual and the social is a phase in apparent historical progress.


George herbert Mead was his collaborator.  He tied his Christian social sympathies to the liberal economy also "the telegraph and land motive are the great spiritual agents of society and we must deal with the real.  Labor orginizing for higher wages and immediate conditions is good.  Propogandizing for a socialist future is bad.  We cannot anticipate change, just now.

But his example showed america wasn't changing.  We live in change he said and implied the liberal world forever.

 

CH 6 MARGINALISM AND HISTORICISM IN ECONOMICS

 

Three models emergerd after the guilded age:  Marginalism, the liberal econ interpretation of history and Veblen's socialist historico-evolutionary economics.

The synthesis of marginalism and classicism was facilitated by Alfred Marshall's 1890 Principles of Economics.  It did show that supply and demand could be affected by differing bargaining strengths and labor and capital (this allowed marginalists to accept some liberal reform.  Historians like to say marginalism beat classical out cause it was seen as more scientific , less metaphysical.  This also explains it being discovered at the same time in three different countries.  But its development was affected by historical peculiarities in Germany and France.  It was resisted well into this century.  It seem to atomistically violate the indivisible totality of the historical world.  It also appeared at a time when laissez Faire gave workers no hope outside the neo-malthusian preachings of abstinence.  Marxist labor theory of value was attacking so the founders of marginalism had to revise the theory of value.  So perhaps this was its great attraction.   Especially in the US where the fate of labor was threatening AE.  Many later proponents were embarassed by Clarks overt sentimentalism and moralism and his tying it to natural law.  It should be remembered though, that the disengaged version taken was politically relevant and ideologically committed.  And polarization had divided the discipline.  But it encoded individualism.  Fisher brought it to America and graphed it to Sumner's positivism and connected it with double entry bookkeeping making it totally math.  After an illness he came back and started to lookat the health of society, Sumners self interest ckuld lead to evil.  Its "natural law' should be side stepped.  He favored child labor legislation etc.  And public health issues as a social support for personal morality.  Fetter also hipped on these said they are objective evils and math showed immigration undercutting labor was too.  Marginalism also offered continuity n the face of change.   Clark had a static and dynamicmodel of economics.  Basic components of static;population, capital, technology, organization of production and consumer wants defined the boundaries within which dynamic changes happened.  Dynanism showed progress on a confined trajectory.  Fisher just ignored history as a mytery.  He was a fatalist.  We can't know what or why, just approve what is.  As science expains the conditions, what would happen under a certain circumstance (not what did or does happen). Economics makes laws that are circumstantial but always true in them.  We need normative economics (to distinfush the real from the ideal) but these are only glitches from the provisional program.


Seligman also concocted a marginalist theory that helped tie the gap between marginalists and liberal historicists.  A gilded ager for reform, but not socialism He grafted a liberal end on laws and evolution being a function of economics.  And, as sure as competition and and capitalism are now necessary, equality and harmony will someday emerge from it and the moral, during abundance, will override economics!  This future was like Mill's stationary state but less modest.  Fetter also bridged the same gap sying thought marginalism created values so did lawmaking collective action and social institions.  Those who moved from liberal historicism blamed histtrical evolution, those moving from marginalism blamed inequality on moreal failings.  Seligman used Clarks concept of value being found by the aggregate, not individual want helped --- (Amer)??--- bolster the organic view he said what society wants must be ethical and good for business.  history did control the market but it was inextricable from the market itself.  He made room for human initiative in his historical determinism with human actions determining political and ethical life.  He predicted social security and minimum wage laws and said the economist belongs on the moving edge of historical progress.

Young and Adams revised Ely's textbook and it (with more a liberal history and less of marginalist view was the number one selling textbook until WWII) It said the market was the best determiner of value but then pointed out where it wasn't true and said organized collective activity is good that there is no preestablished harmony between history, economy and ethical judgement.  Should the market not ethical ideals only control historical action?  It still had too much apocolypse ala Ely for some.  Seligman responded to Halley saying economists must forsake academia and become activists because an aristocracy isneeded by saying that visions of economy and its popularity is due to class interests.  Classical rose with the commercial industrial folk it served.  Economic theory will again be popular only if it can represent all classes.  Hadley said economists should talk to the president.  Seligman said the people in general John Commons said they must speak to a class because speaking to all is status quo and ineffective.  All economists speak for a class.  If elections were due to economic level and not region we'd see it.  Economists represent classes now, not some Seligman future.  Seligman said we must try to represent all.


Patten is the pastor saint of the inability to graft a social ethic onto capitalism.  He said progress was more important than equality and that the weak and unable to adapt should be killed.  A difficulty for historico-economists was the sad state of contemporary history.  It was particularistic and hostile to generalizations.  Commons saw how business leaders were organizing and thought others must too (laborers).  And he did the first great history of laabor and decided that our labor organization was unique as it developed without so much cover of  races, armies, guilds or prelates, but workers had organized before there were factories.  History moved to the AFL with its class consiousness limited to wage and job consciousness.  The AE independent citizen working a bargaining process without predetermined harmony.  Immigrants were old world and the old world traits inconpacitate one for self-government.  Commmons mixed radicalism and AE traditionalism but the biggest challeng to marginalist dominance came from Thorsten Veblen.   He connected evolution to socialism to a democratic reading of AE with his "industrial republic of the socialist" idea.  He saw the tradition of freedom in English speakers being manifest in this (and contemporaneously in Coxey's army .  It meant the nationalization of industry in a democracy.  He, like Patten, saw consumption as central.  But Patten saw it moderating class consciousness  Veblen thought it created class conflict and thought we need a "theory of culture".  Therefore in need of a psychology , he appeared to equate Kan't regulative principle of the reflective judgement with Charles Pierces' guiding principle of inference.  It determines us, given certain premises to draw one inference rather than another.  This is a habit of the mind (sayeth Pierce).  Veblen said the habits of the mind came from history.  he agreed with Marxs italisan revisionists that material conditions ony affect history by affecting the individuals habitual perception of things.  He also believed in functional psychology and racial anthropology.  As history gets goin tools are invented creating new habits of thought and work.  The exploitive force of hunting  look at the rest as degraded and therefore women were oppressed, thenin fuedalism class emerges and owners were a leisure class that collected art for its uselessness.  Industrial bosses put conspicuous consumption over conspicuous leisure.  This behavior filters down to the working class and it creates a false consciousness.  But the machine process and science were giving workers impersonal matter-of-fact habits of thoght.  An important idea of his was distinguishing between industrial and pecuniary functions.  He saw a shift in his 'captains of industry" from caring about money to credit and traced  busingess cycles to them bidding up the value of money beyond the real worth.  This slammed marginalism.  this inefficiency would lead to extinction and socialism.  Classical marginalism  sucked economics should be historic!  The change of sustenance and thus labor in process and then-?_?them., he said, based on evolution, his historical phase eventually clashed with his evolutionary positivism phase (In which he saw all life as an organism with natural selection).  He didn't say if socialism would tiumph for sure, but he thought science would.  He traced science to "idle curiosity' and now it is seen as cause and effect, but its idol and playful purpose remained in modern humanist scholarship.  he tried to critique the pragmatist view of science and stance and said his categories were impartial.  This stance became in the generation to follow.

 

 

CH 7 - TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF SOCIAL CONTROL

 


Sumner had originally argued that society was on a fixed course determined by natural selection and that reason nor morality oculd change it.  Ward had said intervention could shape the future.  Giddings had stressed survival and selection but what was selected was determined by society.  Anyways, in 1906 the first meeting of the American Sociological Society heralded the end of radical splintering.  With Ward as President and Sumner as V- President, they sought common ground towards liberal plitics and liberal exceptionalism for the profession.  Sumner did a study on folkways and mores.  Folkways are somewhat fatalistic.  Mores  are quasi-rational standards of ethics open to some modification science critical will and intelligence could get us change from the causality of history.  Sumner hinted in compromise.  Small said  all can agree that social evolution is different from evolution plain.  They also accomodated other social sciences.  Particularily economics.  Small's original sociology was an attack on classical economics, bringing ethics in economics.  Economics was a subsidiary of sociology.   Many economists jabbed at sociology.  But they didn't interfere with eachother.  All of the new profession sociology accepted capitalism, republicanism and social differentiation.  Rejecting determinism, of course, they stressed the broad determinants in life that they were especially qualified to understant.

 

Smalls Chicago and Biddings Columbia

 

Small wanted to define sociology.  First he did so as the study of goups in association, conflict and accomodation.  As he thought such struggles centered anround wants or "interests" and those were the end the means gathered around, the units of soccial value and action, the interests must be put in harmony and this categorization of human nature and the relation to the ends was the role of sociology.  His followers and coworkers at Chicago studied local charity (the hull house).  Dewey and mead were amongst these.  These studies brought maps into sociology .  They did empirical studies too, without analysis (they thought it would stir the public conscience to action.  Smalls ambiguity keeps him being properly called the Chicago method founder.  But Gidding...  Gollowing Ernst Mach he said theories were inderect scientific descriptions allowing us to group large combinations of facts.  They got heavily into statistics.  He called this inductive sociology.  He tried to quantify sociopsychological types, consciousness of types and other vagueries.  They went away but categories and stats didn't.  Worried about splintering he measured peoples and degrees of sympathy and had a collapse in 1912.  His reliace on numbers was in proportion to his fear of fragmentation.  He did stats but many of his students took up Small's historico-evolutionary bent.

 

The liberal Expeptionalist Sociology of Ross and Cooley

 


Both came to sociology from economics to resolve the guilded age crisis in AE.  Their solutions draw sociology towards the socio-psychological processes.  Ross took the first steps with articles and then a book called social control.  Based on the idea that there is a conflict between the individual and society so society must modify individual feelings, ideas and behavior.  Ther formal and informalmeans were called social control.  He took this towards socialism and had a breakdown in 1892.He was also very concerned with individuals in in their contestwith society.  He had no millenial hope to ground himself on, was literally orphaned, took to German agnosticism and marginalism by which he showed no formal standard of equality could be fair to all and his social control controlled private property and capitalism too.  Someone will always be unhappy.  So equality is impossible , but we used need control.  In this he straddled socialsim and capitalism.  He especially didn't know how aryans could be controlled.  He liked the equality that had existed in the California mining communities.  But industrial progress forced rigidity that subverts "Arcadian" ways.  The drying of social mobility is to fear.  Growth was the key to upward potential.  He as others contrasted small communities with human values with big anonymous societies and their Anomie (Durkheim).  Communal control is natural. Societal ones, artificial ones.  Social controls were fragile and may not grow as fast as needed and, conversely, the spirit on and up needed to be kept from stifling.  Here the hope was the well spring of Aryan esprit.His emphasis on control was applied to monopolies in society  sapping initiative and put emphasis on what bonds us in sociology.  'socialized" and "socialization" appeared.  This nexus between society and the individual became key.  Though Mill used the term "social control" first he used it to fight it ie laissez faire should be extended to free social choice.  Ross used it for liberal control ends.  The actions of capitalism and structural changes over time faded as the paths to understand make harmony.  Though ross wasn't blind to history and the lack of perfect control or nonexistence of one system for all seasons.  The problem seemed predominantly a psychological one.  Giddings found a psychohitch in Adam Smith's "sympathies" (An idea he got from Hume).  Democracy critics had used it in Europe in the ideas of "imitation" and the crowd.  Ross saw social tradition and sanction, not reward and punishment as effective.  Rosss looked at imitation in crowds and studied conflict resolution.  The key to nationalism and progress was discussion.  But he didn't think Tardes' resemblence alone would resolve conflict. (john press wonders if this is where the boy scouts came from) Our change was so fast this was impossible.  And conflict is eternal.  His second book was called "social psychology".


Cooley had less trouble reconciling the individualistic and organicist impulses within himself, sanguine about America and influential in sociology becoming psychological.  He framed the clash of capitalism and socialism as being over the merit of competition.  He distrusted socialism  and set out to betterment of ideals.  Influenced in 1893 , by Dewey he also thought unity, association and sympathy advanced with competition differentiation and individuation.  And that competition could be elevated by public sentiment to higher ideals.  This required contact between peoples ((progress) Dewey said) Cooley said society is an aggregate of individuals who are not seperable , but of one thing and that thing is mental.  We know ourselves only through intercourse with others.  We appear in the "looking glass" (mirror) self.  The individual is "all social". One who entertains the thoughts of others cannot deny them justice.  We must enlarge sympathy.  "virtue is exerting the imagination.  Fusing the organisism of Dewey and functional psychologist and James' stream of consciousness came easily to a man who mostly lived in his own thoughts.  But removing psychological barriers to socialization was ony one half the battle.  Society is shaped by history and organization.  Human nature was developed in primary groups "family, childhood playgoups and community elders".  Democracy and Christianity grew from lessons taught by the eternal primary group.  The task of mankind was to extend the ideals of the primary group to all of mankind.  The task ahead is to become like children in a family.  America's unadulterated nature is far on the way, due to our tuetonic stock and lack of history.  Cooley was the progressive era complement to Sumner in the guilded age.  Sumner spelled out tenets of possesive individualism.  Cooley the new liberal organicism.  Just as Sumner was a repository for libertarians against liberalism , Cooley bolstered the new idealized American Democracy.

 

The meanings of social control.  It now usually means class domination but it meant a normative view of capitalist society when that was seriously contested.  Not class, but social control legitimated by nature herself.  Social control is natural in that man is social.  Idealists social scientists erased the conflict between society and the individual.  If we bring the social side of man out it can be the instrument of control.  Its not coercive, but part of self realization.  Do individuals control society or visa versa?  John Dewey furthered the sociologist tendency to blur power issues by collapsing political into social categories in his poli sci lectures of 1893.  He said sovereignty is an expression of the organic unity of society.  Rights and authority rest on this.  They don't equate social control with the liberalrepublican distrust of power or themselves as controllers by deflection onto nature.  So Gramsci's marxist analysis misses thesubtlety.  These aren't capitalist, but academic social scientist controllers.  Keppers of the AE ideal.  The ideas of social control are a direct heir of the Whiggish ideal of subordinating the individual rights to a greater government definition of public good.  Applied originally against radical workers, it now cut against acquisitive capitalists.  The control went both ways and the users wanted to protect America and lead it to its ideals.  They were concience as well as validator of society.

 


Much American Soc Sci was to stop or control history.  This generation used,  not grace or reason, but the positivist use of science.  Only it now seemed destine to escape the tarnish of history.  It offered prediction and control.  Charles Cooley for one, was hostile to this vision.  He saw social science as art, not science.  But the technocratic vision did start to take hold in the progressive era, as seen in Ross' work.  Ross ends his discussion of social control with excitement of power at having discovered a secret of social control.  He feared its use in the wrong hands by bad folk.  So knowledge of it was to be limited.  The old elites vision was narrow.  The new looked at society as a whole.  It should be esoteric to beobscured from the greedy.  Ethical conflicts  Ross said "would end upon getting scientific answers.  Not to raise but, solve issues".

 

Dewey was one of Ross' big proponents.  Saying, though , philosophy whould be a social science and supporting Ross' central premise, that positivist knowledge could give social scientists rational control over society and history.  Dewey said philosophy must henceforth be a method of science and its field of interest chiefly "psychology and social ethics, including the latter term all the relative concrete social sciences, so far as they may give guidance to conduct.  He said the methods of physical science have not yet been fully applied to life.  Because physical science could see things as interconnected parts in a mechanism.  Where Dewey differd from Ross and so many other social scientists was his belief in democracy.  He began to think of science as a refined form of the pragmatic intelligence, the model of how we think.  He wanted to erase divisions and so overlooked detals like wide differences.  His vision of positivistic knowledge and schools as great factories clashed with democracy.  Both Dewey and Ross' ideas of social control are soft when compared to those that come after WWI.

 

Except Sumner, post gilded age social scientists acknowledged change and tried to bring AE into it by seeing it as a transition and denying clas conflict.  Society was moving to liberal harmony:  an increasingly peaceful rational and ethical adjustment of interests.  That was the message of Small, Giddings, Ross and Cooley.  Social Control was a tool to ease the transformation.  They had ambitions of technocratic benevolent control.  Like European sociologists reshaped history into the two steps 1) community centered traditional and 2)modern differentiated society.  But in Europe it was done with knowledge of history.  Here it was used after the guilded age crisis to trojan horse in AE.  Fear of decline and love of vitality sent Ross to "American Creed" concept.  Sociologists entered the gilded age less mature than economists, So whereas economics came out with the clarity of neo-classicism, sociology didn't.  But they established a good foothold in academia and gave direction to research and theory.  Sociology didn't flourish in England until after WWII.  Their sence of history didn't need to legitimate modern society.  Instead of ideological invention they made social workers.  They saved their ideological inventiveness for anthropology.  This grooved with their imperial role.  The immigrant crisis came after sociology, so not diversity within, but the need for national identity is the face of transformation (our decentralized university system helped too).

 

CH 8 FROM HISORICO-POLITICS TO POLITICAL SCIENCE

 


Whilst economics and sociology played a two stage drama of crisis and liberal revision in the guilded age (under the threat of socialism, which informed its solutions) The challenger to the gentry founders of historico-politics was slower and projected a more moderate vision of AE.  The younger generation in HP (historico-politics) was also born in the 1850s and 60s but was more conservative.  Disaffection in sociology and economics came from egalitarian shortcomings in HP it came from elitest disillusionment with democracy.  They only saught a liberal historicist revision of AE, not radical transformation.  Sociology and Economics drew those with radical sentiments seeking to do things .  Not from evangelical piety, millenial backgrounds, but from business and political backgrounds were their fathers.  Only Osgood, Wilson, andrews and Macy were exceptions.  But they all stood firm in the whig tradition of limited democracy that dominated HP from the early 19th century.  In the gilded age they showed limited sympathy for the workers and none for socialism.  W. Wilson said he had always been a federalist.  The main teachers were Burgess at Columbia and less conservative James and Penn and Patten at John Hopskins.  The younger generations challenge to their gentry predecessors was due to a deeper commitment to historicism and realism.  Only wilson was an advocate of romantic epistemology that allied history and political science with literature.  They got their sense of what science demanded from the Rankean program for historical science.  They used induction from the observed facts and skepticism about preformed generalizations.  They realized that each generation must rewrite history, but saw this as a progression of progress and didn't apply historicism to their ideals.  No infighting brought it to their attention. 

The new HP the articulated came from a crisis of AE and 1) decided that grounding things in tuetonics was ridiculous and should be stopped.  The freedom of past peoles was different from that of a free citizen and while they're is no straight changeless Code of morality, there is slow organic progress.  Change , more, conservative and practical was thus allowed.

Perhaps the most notable statement about republican preservation through Burkean historicism was Ford's.  He showed colonical American politics to be an offshoot of aristocratic English society and American ideas founded in Whig politics.  The constitution was a conservative reaction of the gentry  class against democratic and anarchistic forces.  The party system too had these roots.  But political contest soon led them to seek popular support and so they domocratized politics.  The party system coordinated the different branches of govt.  The constitution had separated.  While showing the constitution as conservative, development does happen.  He said that while our politics may be corrupt, resources of probiby, intelligence and skill (heoic qualities which are the peculiar claim of militancy) were still present.

 


Historicism and realism in history and politics.   The attck on the elders static AE occupied the whole younger generation but soon they split into two groups.  One group emphasizing politics one history in their joint task of finding in history viable principles for historical action.  The group that sought it in history took to Rankean documentation and felt that analysis couldn't be eternal but for a particular time only.  And realistic historicism also provided knowledge of social history.  Jameson's look into the revolution showed it was social and democratic, not just a contrivance by whig enlightened folk and this scared him.  Andrew also liked social history and found an acceptable outlet for it in liberal histiography.  Saying the meanings of history apply to this present day (as Jameson't social look into democracy had implications for Jacksonian democracy).  Andrewsgot prescriptions for now from very detailed study of European and early american history .  But Andrews still based his history on the Anglo English Spirit being transplanted.  Turner was the first to base an account of AE on economic and social foundations.  He put the fronteir (not the germ theory0 up as the reason we is who we is.  When in 1890 the frontier was closed his theory transcribed the crisis in national ideology into the objective terms of histiography and people took notice of him.  Free land created our character, democracy this economic power secured our political power.  As an heir to mugwumpism he also saw problems in this character; strong selfish individualism intolerant of administrative experience or education.  The populists were the latest frontier primitives and radicals.  He said they would pass as they adjusted to reality and consigned the frontier effect to the past.  HE couldn't easily kill us so he was for imperialism oversees and said that this history would continue to inspire us.  He stated that the frontier being a land with no history was a great place to trace the evolution of mankind from the start up.  He kept looking for geographical determinsism that would put our land in us destpite backgroung.  To get an AE based on fusing history and natural, it worked in rhetoric, but not in historical terms.  His frontier thesis was the first fruit of an attempt to creat a "new history" animated and stunted by AE.  The first from the effort to reconceptualize our whole past in liberal terms.  History found our AE in natural encounters with nature.  Not our ideas or social structures brought over from England.  It made individualism THE stand alone quality of Americans.


Group two wanted to use realistic historicism a different way.  These were the politics students bent on hitorical accurracy.  Goodnow said he wanted to show political conditions in formal government is not the same as the actual.  History provided the key to realistic analysis.  Historical realism was turned to the study of  political parties, administration and city government (the black sheep of American politics).  Their mugwump predecessors understood problems of municipal politics but saw them as deviations from the norm.  The younger saw them as legitimate areas of study.  But in as far as they saw the system of divided powers undercutting American politics they were the same.  Woodrow Wilson's "Congression Government" noted congressional dominance was unintended but good and illustrated the universal principle of institutional change.  He didn't like the diffusion of power by parties and liked parliamentary stuff more.  Destructive effect (bad) v. concentrating authority (good) was a theme of this group.  He echoed Napoleon and Jeremy Bentham's themes concerning parse unhampered authoriy.  Goodnow said we must reduce the number of folk in city government.  Give the mayor and city council power.  There are 2 primary functions in government expression and execution of the peoples will.  Execution had to be separate from politics.  The new bent towards realism was , of course, not perfect, it still relied on secondary sources sometimes and saw with prejudice unexamined.  They saw government as organic with a natural organic aristocracy and could see the strong government curtail striking workers and capitalists both.  But the desire to contain democracy was a more powerful theme.  Democracy is suited to ideal conditions of human life only.  Democracy in America means the power to veto and change party leaders, not the power to determin policies.  Their work set an opening for capitalist views of managed government by business principles and for the post war theories of technocratic expert governance.  But the strongest theme wasn't to give givernment tot he capitalists but to themselves.  The gentry program of training a class of educated leaders of expert civil servants came to center on the study of administration.  Like social control for sociologists and economists.  And Whiggishly , in order to stem post war disorder and industrial disorder their writings emphasized the power of the state as they looked at its workingsThey didn't like the absolute individualism of the "social contract" within this framework the most basic disagreement was over the epistmological basis oftheory.  Willoughsby argued for the supremecy of the "essential nature' as opposed to the "mere appearance of political institutions.  Political theory deduced theories of universal applicability.  History didn't produce new truths just errors missed by pure speculative thought.  His type lost and after WWI drifted into international law Most said theory changed with history and displayed little connection to fact.  All books were criticized for a lack of information and too much theorizing.

 

Professional Divisions:  there was no sharp political division that caused acrimony.  Herbert Baxter Adams didn't like the brutal criticism in German Universities and so monstly ignored attacks on his germ theory.  He turned his energy to  the study of American schools and tried  a little to defend his concept of history as past politics.  In 1903 the political scientists professional group, The American Political Science Association (APSA) was formed for the more systematic collection and exchange of information on legislation at different levels of government.  It wasn't contentious.  It did divide though between historians and political scientists.  Our university system, again, allowed and rewarded specialization giving freedom and status.  And historians out numbered.  This increased tension.  The flare-ups were over who would clasim which intellectual doman.  Ahead of the AHA said history "is the name of the residuum which has been left when one group of facts after another has been taken possesion of by some science."  When young historians reviewed political scientists history writing they tore it up.


By the 1890s there was also division based on purity.  The historians thought the search for political norms and involvement in contemporary politics blurred their vision.  We should study history for its own sake with an eye towards truth.  Stephens called for a break with politicos.  Historians do history and political scientists stick to contemporary things.  Andrew wanted a less steep break.  Historians should begin by studying something something that doesn't interest them (for  objectiviety ) and end by showing its relevance to today.  Macy, a political scientist said past events aren't objectively understood by priveledged historians rather what is important about them is what is believed about them today.  And if historicism meant the  past could no longer be unequivically by linked to the present and future it can't serve as a basis for action and should be left behind.  The ground of history must be left to search for political norms.     

Goodnow opened his book with the idea that the two functions in government were from the nature of humanity and government as an organism.  And he studied for prescriptive ends and needed a more absolute basis for what history ought to be than history could provide.  Wilson also reported to universal claims when history could not secure his primary norm.  Wilson turned to anthropology and sociology to determine the natural limits to state action.  This highlighted the attraction science was starting to have for american political science.

The scientific aspiration in political science comes from the drive to make poli sci an independent science.  Ford was one of the two biggies puching this.  He said there are many different forms of government other than Western ones we must study the nature of political outhority no matter what forms it takes.  In his search for norms he read Darwin as applying to the group not the individual since government is an organism we can study its viability in evolutionary terms.  The individual is a subset of the state.  This was a traditional norm from 100 years of Whiggism that used no history.  Abbot Lowell also rejected history with scientific natural law.  By bringing it (as Giddings for sociology) to statistics. (He read lots ofthe disciple of English philosopical and legal positivist Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr. He soon also was against German political science with its conflation of law and morality.  We needed more inductive studies.  He lked our system ineffective , not at all like England and Wilsons parliament ideas.  Our extralegal institutions of party were in accord with our animajoritarian history.  He did a  cross cultural statistical analysis of the US and eEngland.  He called himself a professor of "existing political systems".  History was a repository of the relatively unchanging qualities of human nature.  Though doomed to be inexact, scientific , not historic realism, should be its orientation (He said as the 1920 APSA president.  We must abserve public life not libraries.  History and abstractions are useless.  He could follow this strategy because he trusted the the natural course of historical evolution to sustain AE. 


James Bryce observed and regretted the tendancy of American political scientists to seek universal principles via natural science.  He liked history and like it polisci can create in the class that leads a nation the proper temper and attitude towards the questions that from time to time arise in politics.   Broaden views enlarge sympathies and moderate their narrower passions and give knowledge of facts and general principles.  This word of caution came partially due to the threat of socialism as did the attempt to ground it in sciences.    Sociology also went towards science.  Both disciplines overlapped in the field of public opinion (which bost mostly thought more akin to sentiment than rational reflection.  But Goodnow decided sociology wouldnot help himunderstand a municipal government.  There is no ideal city.  Different cities differ.  And Ford outwardly sparred with sociology.

Conclusion:  The younger generation rewrote historico politics to political science.  They didn't need a sharp break.  They had no citizen polyglot or new industrial machine to fight in their discipline.  Also in economics and sociology younger scholars rewrote the gentry position of a fixed American principle.  In political science they went from abstracts about our AE to detailed study, but with the old gentry bias for rich (the objective analysis of interest groups lay in the future).  Historians didn't transfer to liberal modernity either.  They didn't use econ and social basis for us, but used our English history instead.  Turners frontier topic of sectionalism being democratizing he got no support from socialosgists (who thought industry and nationalism were all (like the econs).  But though histicism opened a gulf between the past and the future many still saw the past as relevant to a changing future but looked to sociology synthesis to apply their findinngs.  In 1903 historians were still smarting from the departure of the poli scientists and social scientists got vicious when historians wouldn't accept Giddings evolutionary look at society.  But Adams said we must discover what really happened, but left the door open for synthesis.

 

PART 4

AMERICAN SOCIAL SCIENCE AS THE STUDY OF NATURAL PROCESS, 1908-1929

 

CH 9 NEW MODELS OF AMERICAN LIBERAL CHANGE

 

The crowd of social scientists (a strange late progressive cohort) wasn't genteel or academic.  The schools were making more specialists.  Many did journalism, came from the country at older ages and were attracted as well as repulsed by the city.  Wome were for strict control in proportion to their feeling out of control.


They had a sense of historic dislocation.  They transversed millenia in coming to the city.  And when seeing that if all written history of makind were placed next to all mankind in 12 hours Bacon would have written at one minute before midnight.  The present is a novelty.  Thinking the past irrelevant and  the present a breach to the future makes one a modern.  Pragmatism fit in well here. Dewey said that old philosophy swerched for eternal truths new philosophy must consider the changing.  This is deontnian evolution applied to philosophy.  Philosophy must become "a method of moral and political diagnosis and prognosis.  "since we live forward what should experience be but a future implied in the present?"  He called pragmatic intelligence "Americas own implicit principle of successful action" and the means to our "Salvation" (pg316) and we need the courage of intelligence to follow wither social and scientific changes direct us.  Modernism cut short Americas little interlude into historicism.  The word "process" became big.  This emerged from historicism and the recognition of history as continuity, not discrete events but means - ends relationships.  Individual events aren't important, the process is and "precess" is a common denominator between nature and history a convergence of historicisms continuous change and social scientific look at history as natural evolution.  Social scientists came to understand american history as a self renewing natural process ingering in the character of liberal society.  This found companionship in anthropology where Franz Boas challenged the linear model of evolutionary development after the ingeritance of acquired characteristics was disproven and folks more looked to the peculiar interacting factors that make human variety and progress.

Political Crisis 1912-1920

The first round of disillusionment came after the sucesssful attack on progressive legislation by conservatives, seeing the supreme cvourt shoot down progressive legislation made folks see that progressive action wasn't keeping up with economic and social change so more social control was needed.  And after WWI folks thought that a new order could come out of the ruin.  But all that they got out of it was a feeling of of impotence.  A recourse away from subjectivity to facts happened.  Perhaps stats would give themauthority.  Technology wasn't seen as an unqualified good.  Dewey said we don't control technology it controls us.  But "the recourse of a courageous humanity is to press forward... until we have a control of human nature comparable to our control of physical nature.  The war increased the acceptance of irrational psychologies (Frued and Behaviorism).  Thomas grew pessimistic about our ability to avoid decline through change, change comes from individuals, but society opposes individuals.  Only the "creative man" working with scientific law would be able to affect change.  Also, our place as post WWI world police made us think of control.  They also got a boost as many social scientists were used in the war effort.  And our wartime effort was awesome. And during the war those with wrong views were fired, those left were to turn their attention wholly to the new "business of science"


New Concepts of Science: Positivism was reconstructed.  Karl Pearson'sGrammar of Science denounced science as objective truth saying it only reflects our senses and ways of logic, but its the best tool we've got.  And pragmatism particularly Dewey's reworked out our view of science:  Knowledge is socially constrated and its validity determined by its usefulness to human purposes, purposes that are plural and changing.  If science is defined by its method, its not because that method provides special access to phenomenal experience, but because that method leads to practical knowing in the world and is sustained by a socially organized world of experience.  This turned philosophers job to the practical with natural science setting the standard for knowing.  It is unclear whether Dewey was urging all fields of knowledge to adopt the abstracting generalizing, quantitative method of natural science.  He said "using the historic was good for general events by isolating small common factors.  Dewey said only when nature is considered mechanical can it be subdued to human purposes.  Only when quantities were subordinated to quantitative and mathematical relationships.  Though he criticized the extremes he endorsed behaviorism generalyy as the humanities andpositivistic science pulled apart he saw more the difference between the abstracting generalizing method of natural science and the sympathetic "observation of concrete particulars required for the moral and practical use of science.  He continued to use particular problems to fuse method with purpose.  The advancing  abstract, generalizing scientific method left historic knowledge with out firm legitimization.  HIstorians and philosophers in Germany sought to explain the character of historical knowledge.  Dilthey came up with hermeneutic conclusions and Dewey's method could lead to the same conclusion, Wever had an idea.  But Dewey was so wed to positivist prognosis that he avoided the problem of how a historical world could be understood. Dewey thus left social sciences on undeterminant pragmatic grounds from which it could go several directions.  R. Hoxie used Deweys legitimization of genetic analysis to develop a historic method.  Mitchell, Bently and Park used pragmatismto develop heterodox but still positivistic concepts of social science.  For most social scientists of this period pragmatism is a more superficial influence reinforcing the relativistic lessons of economic interpretations of history and the call for a "policy of opportunism' in social reform.  These 2 new influences on science, pragmatic and positivist made folks look for a genuine science of social control and leading others to wonder how natural scientific method could be applied to the historical field of social experience. 

 


Bently and Beards social science.  Bently rectified the individual and society and science by looking at groups to account for individuals insides he took Watson's "external" and "potential" activities and "tendencies" of activity.  All measurable.  Individual ideas are faulty reflections of the groups.  This book of Bently's gave minimal attension to administrators.  Bently said despite what socialists say there are no real classes.  This hard grouping doesn't exist.  Smaller groups do.  Not a caste system here.  Bently hadn't seen the South's caste system.  He thus set the model for American pluralistic politics and classlessness, the mainstay of liberal exceptionalist ideology in the 20th century America.  All held in place within a system and considering the amount of battle there is little bloodshed.  Government is the process of adjustment of a set of interest groups in a particular distinguishable group or system.  He denied the system "self realizing capacity" but it could produce the adjustment or balance of interests and this creates order.  As Polisci was largely still dedicated to historical realism, this was a novelty, but in attempts to find stability in constant turmoil and escape for AE it was not new.

 

Beard enters the scene at the tail end of the guilded age search for transformation.  He also bridged the break of history and political science.  He worked on historic reconstruction and practical political aims.  His big claim to fame was grounding democracy in the development of industrial capitalism.  He picked up Bentley's interest groups and applied in against big business and hoped a stronger government could control it.  But if politics is a manifestation of economics how can politics change economic destiny, let alone the individual caught in this organism.  Whiggishly his biggest work 'An Economic interpretation of the Constitution" showed it was ratified by groups having economic interests in a national government via credit in the national debt and public land.  It was opposed by groups whose wealth was in local land and politics.  This made the constitution less sacrosance.  The constitution was antimajoritarian.  His next work punctured AE by saying there was an economic aristocracy and a proletariate. workers struggles would lead to change not evolution, like to Bismark progressivism and the reformation of catholicism.  Thus Beard and Robinson (who thought the process they detailed as they smashed myths was good) created the new historicism which turned historiography towards modernity.  It was used in the 1900s also.

PG 346 Bentley's critiqu was part of a wider scientific revolt against sythetic, normative sociology grounded in universal characterists of human nature and moral economy.

Thomas first groung our behavior in primitive responses like irratability and then said long rage can mediate it.  But then he argued (with Franz Boaz) that savages are just as intelligent as we and put lots of emphasis on environment and socialization.  He did a big survey on immigrants and negros which involved distance and sympathy as  an anthropologist, can make the stranger femailiar and the familiar strange.  He called the survey social psychology; the study of attitudes.  He emphasized nationality and said polish as well as American values are good.   People don't have blank slates to be Americanized.  And the group is being Americanized.  Social flux + attitudes = new attitudes.  And attitudes are a product of a whole life.  Therefore case studies are better than stats which just show symptoms of attitude in general (In the specific, he said the second generation needs to be Americanized more than the first).


Park agreed that since groups and individuals are always in flux attitudes are important.  Sentiments and attitudes were found in Hume and Adam's "sympathy" This linked the public (also the public has institutions of authority). his texxt on sociology had chapters on competition, conflict, accomodation and assimilation.  Competition creates impersonal social order. (In the process, not structure).  Accomodation is social (where we do not really find control.  All is natural like an ecosystem.  In the south the process of assimilation leading to voluntary association and order via competition was hampered by the skin color which would lead to black nationalism.  We don't have classes (even socialism only created a party) but vocational groups (would they become distinct, like cultural groups)?  In the city (the center of modern society and proper area of study) as primary groups break do we need an American form of social control.  What has nature in store for us!  We need social control of nature to protect the individual in his struggle to remain an individual in the overstimulating city.  18th century enlightenmnet and 19th century romanticism and liberalism make for the force towards individualism.  In the historically created money economy this created potential for psychic existence.  Sociologists study the same stuff as historians, but take things out of context and then are a natural science (science being denoted, not by what it studies, but by how) but at the cost of abstraction (not vital, intuitive and experiential like historical knowledge).  The abstract can convert enlarging history to useful knowledge and tools.  History and interpretation are propaeductic (providing introductory instruction) to sociology. Max Weber's relationship of history to natural history asked why unless meaningful make history into natural history (history with categories and comparisons).

Objectivism in sociology- Thomas and park set the tone for behavioristic science of social control but understood the complexities of turning mental and historic life into objects of science better than those that followed.  luther Bernard for example who thought all revious were mistakily attracted to utilitarianism hedonistic psychology - feeling could not set the standard in a world where training must modify instinct, where culture and artifice are more important than the "natural" the true social standard comes from the development of the organic society.  True freedom comes from total control, not the individual.

Bernard wasnt' the only one in this new school of objectivism.  his Chicago moral objectivism was matched by Giddings methodological objectivism which involved natural selection and stats.  Chapin took up this work but said there were too many variables for the exact controls of science to work.  Thomas said there are only 2 social situation and attitude therefore case studies  not stats are the way for sociology.

From Veblen to intitutional economics-  Hoxie and Mitchell.

Hoxie saw the heaping of facts hoping a principle will emerge as wrong.  Bu selecting a subject it interests you because of something specific.  Taking from Dewey he said to approach history with a well formulated question.  He did participant observer histories of labor unions he found 1820 craft unions, the 1830 are utopian, 1900 class unions, but they didn't work cause class isn't a good divider in America.


 Davenport was a marginalist who said we must study economics as it is and money doesn't come from moral savings it comes from banks.  He followed Veblen's notion of pecuniary v. industrial income and his masterpiece is the 1913 "Business Cycles".  it rallied for empirical research in economics as Thomas' polish peasant would years later in sociology.  It was based on declining expectations bringing a shrinking of credit and then liquidation.  This was a description and then a history thing and then an economic thing, very confusing.  He was easily real and accepted unlike Veblen, by neo-classicists.  He did say, however great that the general good didn't necessarily come out of this economy based on making profit, not things for individuals.  And it was made for imperfect plannng  not for socialism, he said the government should publish more statistical barometers.  This would help lessen the business cycles that were getting more and more severe as credit grew in importance.

Mitchell was historico in that he never thought any two cycles the same.   The differences were due to outside forces like wars, tarrifs, peace and changes in economic organization.  This was loved as reassuring and business people took to it.  He then, after fame, decided to study psychology and economics.  He went to behaviorism and sanctioned by Deweys caution to look to the concrete and studied consumer behavior, labor relations and the outward, non-esoteric psychological behavior of people and using stats psych guessing would be over for economists.  He thought the rest of social sciences could become natural sciences from this.  Of course, this measured the behavior of the aggregate, not historical actors.  Money rationalized economic behavior.  Thus the uses of money lays a foundation for a rational theory of that life Burke took an inclusive line saying historical economists could study the institutional change while marginalists could study the rational logic of business.  Of course this would entail it assuming or not the market.

This late progressive cohort shaped their disciplined for the liberal understanding of modern America.  Their choices were of liberal AE's that shaped change as much as reflected it.  Process put them all at the intersection of history and nature, seeking to insture both concrete and particular and flux.  Part of the attraction of looking at process was the ability to project an idealized liberal vision of modern American society with out decay or race or trouble.  Yet even within this framework required social control.  History was no longer the framework/solution model it was the problem.  After them the shift goes from historico evolutionary models to professional specialized social science models that look at the short term.

 

CH 10 Scientism

 


Scientism took over after WWI.  It made for order in historic flux.  It made good on the positivist claim that natural science provided certain knowledge, prediction and control.  Science was now defined by its method.  It arose due to professionalism, channelling anxieties and disillusion with politics into professionalism.  After the war, progress was still believed in.  But history was distrusted so the belief was in less progress coming from the human mind and also not from organic history.  And progress became dependent on science.  But science couldn't prove progress, so "change" became a common replacement.  Just after the war, mitchell published a study on distribution of wealth that shocked may who had faith in the US  Then came economic recovery, decline in labour repression, the versaaile, and the league of nations and a reactionary president.  Thus eroded the belief that politics was going to get us any progress.  As the man in the streets and the rich shrunk from the immediate penalties of trying to change capitalism it fell to social science experts. 

The departure from politics involved some bitterness.  Stuart Rice said those helping the poor couldn't get emotional satisfaction in their own class.  Psychology with psychoanalysis attacked politics.  All due to your own problems.  Emotion goes towards scientificness in social science experts.  Capitalist fellowships started boosting science especially in chicago.  But this involved a leash.  The New School for Social Research had Dewey and Veblen, was committed to scientism, but also social democracy and therefore got no funds.  The late progressive shift from understanding to control was put to extremely objective measures of behavior and statistics without values.  In this context Dewey's pragmatism served a number of functions.  He was for the whole move to science (406).  The range of pragmatisms showed the range of scientism.  The defining statement of Dewey's pragmatism and the decade was his THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY.  He held to his theme of perpetual change, but derided folks in ability to accept it and constant need for certainty. Security amid change would come from pragmatic intelligence hence the scientific method.  The power of method is the power of action through which problematic situations are resolbed.  Action in history against the uncertainty in history.  And the national basis of security was against the confusion of tongues, beliefs and purposes that could be resolved by scientific methodology that brings consensus.  He, went lefter and lefter.  After the 20s he was for social democracy.  But was still in the discourse of AE.

 

------Institutionalism V. Neoclassicism in economics---


The institutional economics of Hoaxie and Mitchell became the distinctive feature of economics in the 1920s and 30s.  But its dent in neoclassicism predominance didn't suplant its position.  Johnson and others helped neoclassicism incorporate progressive and historic change by saying that the market was great and had a tendancy towards fairness, but though socialism was bad, there was room for government action.  Others developed stats and helped fill out terms of government practice, but didn't challenge  leave neoclassical economics.  But some found the static neoclassicism not good in reform and in a moving world and started institutional economics.  And was useful in application as some pragmatic definitions of science would require.  There was no reason to exclude evidence that was relative just because it couldn't be treated with accuracy.  The proper standard of science was comprehansiveness.  This got us the concept of externalities.  One Clarke Jr. said if overhead costs were born by the employers and would include down factories and workers wages (turned to salaries) it would ease competition and flatten the  business cycle.  The turning point back to neo-classicism came when Mitchell was attacked.  "stats offer us useful analytical and empirical tools but cannot remake theory"  This coincided with 1927 sacco and vansetti and 2nd wave of radicalism looked immanent and nationalistic economics upsurge in Europe and threat again of socialism.  But also from intitutionalisms failure to study institutions and find a focus.   Anyhow it, like neoclassicism, couldn't sove the depression.

Institutionalism as a movement, however, fell victim to the Great Depression and its Keynsian remedy.  For self-proclaimed experts in historical change, their inability to come to any better understanding of the Depression than their neoclassical colleagues was a considerable deficit.  Mitchel in particular, who predicted like everyone else that the downturn would right itself within a year or two, was driven deeper into his program of empirical research by this proof of ignorance.  Whether a more powerful and genuinely historical intitutional economics would have done better is imposssible to say.  Like the left-liberal economists generally, the intitutionalists were drawn into Keynesian revision of neoclassicism. 

Analyzing aggregate categories of income and expenditure for the economy as a whole, and using marginalist analytic techniques, Keynes showed that the economy could stabilize at levels below full employment.  To function at full employment the market needed the intervention of government to regulate and supply investment.  Keynesian economics was thus a proof-by the extension of neoclassical technique itself-of the institutionalists' claim that the market was not an optimum self -equalibriating process and that the intervention of government was necessary to achieve democratic social goals.  The Keynesian analysis of aggregate income and expenditure also reconstituted neoclassicism into macro economic analysis of the national economy as a whole and marginalist microeconomics. Institutionalism had helped to prepare the way for Keynes's governmentalist solution and to provide the statistical information on which macroeconics was built.  Keynsian macroeconomics in turn built onto the neoclassical paradigm those new liberal public goals that had been shown to be compatible with and necessary for optimal market function, such as governmental rules for fair competition, a welfare safety net, and fiscal stimulation of the market. 

AS one economist ruefully explained, Keynes "promises something that cannot be resisted: full employment and high levels of consumption without serious disclocation of our institutions"  He was rueful because the claims of democracy remained subordinate to market requirements, logic and premises.  Moreover, Keynesian neoclassicists in America, unlike the Marxists influences Keynesians in England, inserted the concept of equilibrium into macroeconomics, removing it still further from the exigencies of history.  Over time the core microeconomic theory has become progressively more massive and more mathematical, and its ahistorical conceptual world increasingly dominates macroeconomics.  In that disciplinary context, the presence of history remains adventitious (acquired by accident: appearing in an unusual place or sporadic manner).  As the institutionalisms originally recognized, without the countervailing power of a historically grounded theory, the historical and institutional dimensions of economic life and the values they embody become vulnerable and unreal.


 

--Frank Knight and the final turn against History---

 

He ruthlessly showed contradictions in all and became the founder of the libertarian Chicago School of Economics.  Premise is that the life of man is a series of ordered intelligent choices.  As a christian he wrote temptation is a  furnace house in which g o d proves character .  Life is an arena for moral choices.  He studied Bullock's text which emphasized consumption as moralchoice (save, avoid  luxury becuase its injurious).  He found that because we generally knopw the consequences of our actions we can learn we are making good choices but the externals of the future bring uncertainty and there is risk so intuition is more important.  The are defects in capitalism as in knowledge.  He feared reforms offsprings.  The irony of choices having proximate morality and bad ends!  Political encroachment on economics lessened the capacity for intelligent choice.  Market caused rationality: Politics is played for poswer not rational ends and must stay out of econ  Politics is outside the material market (which causes intelligence) therefore involves bad thinking and demigogues.  He was anti institutionalist and anti the "art" of economics (not the science).  He hated Dewey and applied economics words  to the analysis of politics and history disappeared as the utility maximizing behavior of individuals ascended.

 

--The influence of instrumental positivism on sociology---

Instrumental positivism is a worship of statistics as objective and professional and giving answers.  But I see how they preclude studying other than what is value judgements or solutions.  OGborn turned on to psychoanalysis and saw repressed economic motives in history and that all social philosophies come from childhood complexs and we need statistics not theory in social science. So we must separate social scince and life.  Thomas' Polish Peasant cmae under attack as subjective and unreliable.  His idea of attitudes though was systematized by Emory Bogartus who used surveys to measure attitudes, he became skeptical of folks self knowledge though and the use of groups was seen as unscientific.   He replied for the social interactionists though saying the individual was no more final than the group.  His work was carried on by Thrstone who made sliding scales to measure attitude (he also realized the imperfect relation of atitute to action. 

Thomas thought opinions weren't attitudes.  Attitudes came from a whole life in complex social situations.  Opinions were simple and out of context.  So he liked the case study which gave more accuracy in prediction because it gave meaning.  Though he increasingly accepted statistics as a correlary.  Symbolic interactionists claim his progeny (george herbert mead et al.) saying all social interaction involved an irreducable level of symbolic meaning (as against behaviorists abandoning of meaning).  But thomas was grounded in the individual. 


Park saw all as ecologically grown, like circles growing around a city of people, space and the changing position of the individual in it statistically maybe the destiy of sociology, but then changed to include attitudes in space which determined individuals and was worthy of study.  Then he grought in the individual as a reflection in contrast with others via social status.  History and interpretation were still out.

 

--History as Nature----

If history didn't do well in sociology netither did the understanding of history.  The focus went to community.  But uncertainty of our fate kept it alive.  Park saw cyclically evolving to adaption due (often to market pressures).  He found race identity disappeared and peoples died out but civilization lives.  At first he wasn't sure about blacks though.  He trained many black sociologists.  All this assimilation came at the cost of homogeneity.  Parks method, and its disassociation with politics and history, mapping and opinions is known as the Chicago school of sociology.  One such study found commonalities is one area. 

In the 20s ogburns "social changes" book carried the evolutionary field of Western history with an a-historic methodology.  He found compelling the idea of cultural evolution above material evolution leading to "a majestic order".  His idea of cultural lag showed culteral evolution behind material evolution.  He tried to use statistics fruitlessly.  He thought social trails material, so social control is impossible., but social adjustment would constitute "social progress".  Park countered that the adjustment wasn't conscious it was just naturalism in action. 

Another person, Chapin, saw cumulative progress, but realized that stats are hard to use in history because categories change.  Change calculated cycles in everything.  Basing this on biology he attributed the curves to social learning and turned to stats on "speech relations" and "muscular behavior patterns" for verification. Sociologies traditional problem of historical evolution didn't mesh with science.  At this time Teggard at Berkely tried to divide history into art or science.  He attacked the exclusion of art was thus the exception that proved the rule.

 

---Conversion and resistance in Political Science---


Political science instantly responded to Merriams 1921 call for a new science of politics.  He didn't want to abandon the heritage of historical realism, but sought to refine it by the practice of measurement, comparison and standardization of material.  A ten year study to analyze the length and kind of supreme court ruling was one example.  A science of administration was started.  Here they were usurped by economists.  In administrering ability tests psychologists took over.  The lack of science background always hurt them, the whiggish political scientists managed to just sever administration and politics, helping centralize decision making power.  Merriam was, like others, disillusioned with politics and snuck in his avocation of psychology to show that people were irrational and had to be led.  He thought public education via new psych techniques could create a new citizen (with eugenics to boot).

Lasswell was Charles Merriams student.  He was of the same ilk.  He said propoganda is a manipulation of symbols which is the naturealinnevitable accompanymnet of arguement and persuation that existed in a democracy.  Propoganda was good as it would promote the "engineering frame of mind"  The conflict model is out of date the propogandist understands society is a process of defining and affirming meaning.  Laswell studied under psychologists.  This was a transfer, not a change from, of the progressives belief in resolving political  conflict via public education to a disillusioned crowd.  He was aware this could be used to bad ends, but said there is no tool invented that a burglar cannot use.  A more liberal use of Merriam's agenda for political science was another student's use of statistics to guage attitudes of non-voters.  HE found they didn't know when or where to vote.  Being afraid of being lumped in with the outmoded historical method or leftists ways they aboided concepts like interest groups, didn't differentiate people and came to the conclusion that non-voters were just like the public at large.

----for and against scientism---

There was, of course, a backlash against the encroachment of psychology and the worship of science over historico-politics.  The right opposing pragmatism attacked scientific appraoch and looked to accepting "coherent logic and normative values".  Pragmatism they said was the root of positivism and positivism led to the empiricism of facts in method and fascism in Mussolini's Europe.  What of democracy if we use behabiorism which denies man as a rational actor?  If man is a blank slate should education or blind self interest dominate.  If all natural science and competition what of the individual.  Both Beard and Dewey show anxiety of living in historical times.  Beard's 1926 presidential address to the APSA is a case in point.  He urged political science to train its students for an unforseeable future.  He somewhat of an antiscientist guy, argued agains measurables of the logically discribable, for a greater use of the deductive and imaginative.  Conservative imagination could adjust us to our human destiny.  His speech was laden with mechanical references to doom.  In his arguement against putting science in political science he quoted Benedetto Croce" reality cannot be described without philosophical implications".  But he had little effect, though on historians maybe.  The traditional vs. the scientistic did deadlock and funding to the APSA turned, after the depression , to scientism of behavioral science, systems analysis and public management.

 


The advent of scientism marked in many ways the resolution of the gilded age crisis in AE.  First the view of us as outside history by Francis Wayland et al, then the crisis forced us into history.  But it was staved off by scientism.  Both technical and professionalism helped social science distance itself from national ideals that weren't so bright shiny new.  these trends have the least impact in political scientist coming from a trained historicist perspective and directly responsible for the republic they tend to keep the AE republican language alive.  But most social sciences recast all in scientific language.  Institutionalists came from sociologists old attack on classical economics.  And beard carried the historians attack on the scientism of political sciences.  But, beyond interdiscipline conflict all were torn by scientism.  The institutionalists and neoclassicists both claimed it.  In sociology hard edged behaviorism and positivism set the terms for debate.  Since the decline of Small there was no historical school to mount a counter attack.  But gidding's followers (Ogden and Grolpin) addressed short term change and what Chicago retained of history was its acknowledgement of situations and the symbolic nature via which this was changed.  The characteristic premises of historicism were divided between the  the schools and both subdued to scientism.